The difference between style and taste is never easy to define, but style tends to be centered on the social, and taste upon the i...ndividual. Style then works along axes of similarity to identify group membership, to relate to the social order; taste works within style to differentiate and construct the individual. Style speaks about social factors such as class, age, and other more flexible, less definable social formations; taste talks of the individual inflection of the social.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

True. There isa beautiful Jesus....He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef.How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in!How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes!But I can't. Need is not quite belief.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

It must be confessed that the Pilgrims possessed but few of the qualities of the modern pioneer. They were not the ancestors of th...e American backwoodsmen. They did not go at once into the woods with their axes. They were a family and church, and were more anxious to keep together, though it were on the sand, than to colonize a New World.... It is true they were busy at first about their building, and were hindered in that by much foul weather; but a party of emigrants to California or Oregon, with no less work on their hands,--and more hostile Indians,--would do as much exploring the first afternoon, and the Sieur de Champlain would have sought an interview with the savages, and examined the country as far as the Connecticut, and made a map of it, before Billington had climbed his tree.... Nevertheless, the Pilgrims were pioneers, and the ancestors of pioneers, in a far grander enterprise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »